Transcript: DjangoCon US 2025 Recap

youtube you must check out the video will's got this amazing soft back like you must check out

it's just gorgeous i'm also wearing glasses i had to get glasses for the first time in my life

two weeks ago and it's so is that like presbyopia is that is that really cool

yeah well it's two things yeah good good for you it's like you're married to a doctor or something

and a lot was about um presbyterian church leaders did um imposing you know their particular ethic

upon the rest of the country so um it means elder the press the presbyter bit means oh i wondered

okay yeah welcome back to django chat podcast on the django web framework django web framework so

we've been off we've been off for the summer we're back trying new things and you know six

years in almost seven years in we're just going to mix it up we're going to do videos we're going

to do guests not guests um yeah just have fun with it so the big news yeah we'll go back to

our regular cadence of uh twice a week or every two weeks fortnightly as they say yeah there's a

perfect word for it if only it was internet yeah well but nobody nobody says it in the u.s

unfortunately like you sound pretty pretentious to say it to american yeah no if you were i mean

it wouldn't bother you you could say it but i if i when i say it it's you know when i say all that

english that's i know right yeah um all right so let's dive in so we're going to talk about we're

back uh django con us just happened last week which i was at and i was live texting you the

whole time so there's some things to talk about apis maybe coming into django and other things

and we're also we're going to do our ads so we we're very thankful to have a sponsor hacksoft

uh you're a django development partner beyond code we're going to talk about them a little

bit later because both of us had a chance to spend some time with them at django con europe

in april yes so carlton summer go what was what was the summer like we haven't you know without

the podcast we don't we don't talk like we used to you know this is just kind of an excuse for us

i'm about to go to bed and i text you and you're still no it's just it just doesn't work um it was

good like the summer here is long because the kids finish school the last week of june and they don't

go back till like you know the second week of september and so that it's like it's a long break

um but i really enjoyed it um we were busy over the summer um i can spoil as ever we'd had google

summer code coming on we were getting ready for you know helping to um get some of the features

in there for Django 6.0 which we'll talk about in a minute but it was just a nice relax it was

quite busy I had to take August like July was very busy I had to take August a little bit more on the

back burner because I just needed some rest so that I get I could arrive now in September and

actually be fresh yeah yeah for sure so you feel fresh I feel surprisingly lively I mean I went I

was away I had a week's holiday with my eldest in first week September he wants to go to university

in france so we did a lightning tour of french cities it was wonderful i got back when i was

i mean and it's it works i mean it's not it's not the quick quickest way of learning a language i

suspect and it may not be the best way of language language but i could have been playing candy crush

bit of yeah they're all the same um well that's good it's nice to see you back i'm just staring

at my notes uh and trying to remember you know what did you do in the summer what did i do i i

had to think about it so so people at django con us told me there there's an updated version of

bingo for this podcast where i have to we have to mention jeff triplet and i have to say i worked

it i work at a pie charm so i'll get that out of the way you got those done early but since i work

at PyCharm JetBrains I traveling going to conferences so I got to go to EuroPython in

Prague for the first time beautiful city I was at the booth so a little bit you know stuck there

but also had a lot of conversations with people I can't say I saw a ton of the city but it's a

next level they're all teenagers now and then move on to the next level and they're less slightly

more independent I can become kind of old man of the European conference scene I've never been to

unsurprisingly there's a different group there's not a lot of overlap between the u.s tour and the

well your store right it's just like yeah no it's beautiful and actually i was struck by

um there's like you know there's a there's a river that runs through prague so i could go

along at every morning for a run and chicago is actually in a way similar to that because there's

a big river near where my hotel and the venue was except chicago is like 50 100 story buildings in

prague a little bit more manageable but you can walk along and there's cafes and it's really

with a colleague in the morning and we're like what is that you know because it looks it's over

looks over 100 years old and now they have these beautiful

cafes and bars in it

I was like they surely didn't make it

you know and these if this is

the opening there's these glass doors so they open them like

this so you can walk on the side

so yeah amazing city

excuse me really

good food and everything I have this

new setup trying to get going

what else you were

invited but you were busy there was a Django

20th episode on

talk Python so Adrian

Halavati Simon Wilson Jeff

uh triplet tibo colas our president and me even though i was like don't put me on here like but

you couldn't attend carlton so i got your spot so that was really nice to sort of go back

memory lane a little bit between simon and adrian and jeff um to be fair since they were all have

the show notes it's a nice it was a nice chat um so if you didn't catch it like i'd recommend

it's worth that you know half hour and 2x certainly yeah right yeah uh but yeah no i think

built for a professional use case and his and simon and jacob's design philosophies and just

personalities you know are really clear uh in the framework today so jacob caplan moss was at

django con us which was great and he's on the board and very involved what else uv live stream

with michael kennedy so that was through pyjama that was fun uh a little nerve-wracking to talk

for an hour or talk for an hour but i was the great thing about michael is you can just sort

of get him going and he'll no i mean he's such a pro yeah no he's he's wonderful um django survey

is coming up that'll be released soon we're gonna do a show about that we're gonna do a show about

that yeah we'll do i think the next show we'll do on that so they'll the results are ready i gotta

do a blog post hopefully i took some videos at django con us because the python survey came out

jet brains do a wonderful thing i'd like they put an awful lot of effort into it it's a big thing

and it's every single year the python survey django survey i just you know little round of

applause which is the effort and commitment that jet brains has shown for that over the years i

um and then lastly my personal site i've been trying to write a little bit uh so wsvincent.com

and it's it's a ruby jekyll site that's how you know it's old so i just i've been trying to vibe

code it just because i wanted something that matters but i can sit back and just be like

all right agents like do your thing so yeah it's got new search and as well if i had to

versions i just can't be bothered and use django i know i know i will but i have i have learn

django.com which is a django site which has all that and and surprisingly hasn't broken or anything

that's doing great despite my neglect so that's yeah that's going up to the right your django

tagline isn't it does great despite your neglect yeah so anyway so yeah busy summer and let's talk

about django con us so that was last week and i was there the whole time maybe i'll i'll tee it

up and then you can or i know we can discuss it i was texting you the throughout the whole thing

it was almost like i was there i mean i was uh you know i know i well i missed i missed you at

something and we can kind of you know hand them off to each other as a next step but yeah you

should take a cut out of me with you know i can just put out no i need to bring a sign that just

says carlton says hi because that was i would be like carlton i talked to so and so so and so you're

like oh say hi sometimes i showed i showed the phone i showed the you know i actually had said

yeah yeah yeah um so carson gross uh creator of htmx gave the keynote and this was uh did i link

yeah i wrote actually i just wrote up uh a written review of the conference um which we'll link to

where i mean it's a great talk it was about this japanese um designer at who worked at nintendo

and his concept of withered technology which is sort of an older version of boring tech

and carson made a lot of great analogies between htmx hypermedia and you know just with experience

you don't have to you can focus on sort of delight rather than just technical brilliance for the sake

travel to the the u.s when they announced the the keynotes but when i heard it was carson i was like

ah that really stings you know like to miss the conference to miss the community yes those things

but then to miss carson who um with htmx is a bit i've been building a product last two and

a half years i've been using htmx since day one and i'm just so on board with it and it's for me

it's so right and it so speaks to what the world the web is and can be and it fits so well with

django yeah and to not be able to you know and i banter with carson online and to not be able to

javascript so he's he's a professor in montana so he doesn't do much django himself but you know

this htmx is there and the django community has adopted it more than almost more than anywhere

go full single page application you know i mean it's it's unfair to say it's the new jquery but

it's a little bit you know it's just like sprinkling your inner activity and he also

you know about my experience of building with um both htmx and alpine the last couple of years um

one of the lines that one of the points i make is i haven't had this feeling since the old days

of using jquery just you know tags make your selection tag on a you know do these long lines

of jquery and it was wonderful it was glorious yeah well with alpine and htmx i've really found

there's the like data star and there's um alpine ajax which is another one which kind of package

up a bit more than htmx and i'm interested by the people to talk to the people who use those

different options as to what they what they're getting which htmx doesn't offer i think i think

maybe they're slightly higher level they perhaps have better encapsulations of some things that

you have to do manually with htmx i'm not sure because i haven't really dug into well i think

several people talking about you know the combination of htmx and alpine and

there's a couple edges there like if you want to go automatic back refill i don't know i took some

notes on it but he has i mean he's a smart guy he's got lots to say so with htmx if your htmx

alpine component in that all works fine but if you've got an alpine component inside it there's

a little bit of htmx that you swap out and put into fresh bit alpine can get confused you have

to you have to sort of either use the morph plugin so that alpine knows or you have to go back to

alpine and say hey by the way in it this bit of tree here well i have i wrote it down somewhere

off um so he's got lots of tips he was i was i was sitting in a group of people who've been

using it much more seriously than i have uh so anyways we'll try to get him on but yeah great

talk i think aligns with the ethos of django and i know and i i it's it i mentioned to you i think

it's worth saying so in django land htmx is the hotness like all the top talks the last two years

if you look on youtube uh for django cons htmx is the top one and yet someone walked out i walked

out with someone from that talk and they they turned to me and said i'd never heard of htmx

to each other and no one in the wider ecosystem's got any idea what's going on

repeating myself you know say it in the podcast put it in the newsletter put it in a thing

you know i mean give people the chance to cut me off because i hate people telling me something

i've already heard but um you know meet people where they're at it is yeah um and

It's like Carson Coffee Break Will, right?

Yeah, yeah.

How was that?

Well, so I mentioned in my blog post, so he gave the keynote and everyone was there and then it went two tracks.

So there's an upstairs and a downstairs, which is unavoidable with the venue.

It was maybe the only thing that if I could wave a wand and change the, you know, going up and down the stairs is a little divided.

So but I still had, you know, I'd have the audience. It motivated me to put HTMX in my demo because I was like, oh, this will be. So I was I was quite pleased. And when I present when I submitted the talk, I thought I would just do the version of the DjangoCon Europe when I did, which was Django for data science. But then I was like, oh, Django for AI, because, you know, kind of what's the difference? But then that got me thinking, oh, I have to.

So it's two thirds new. So basically the whole DjangoCon Europe talk where I talk through a lot of the code, I really didn't want to talk through views files, you know, 20 line views files. So it's sort of a two parter on classic machine learning, which was the DjangoCon Europe one talking about how quickly you can train a model.

I use the iris data set get a job lib file and then Django is perfect to deploy that throw some

forms store the data in a database I think more data science people should know that Django is

there for them you could you could clone the repo and vibe code almost any model in there and I

think that would so that would help and then the second part I went on this tangent about LLMs

you know not lecturing people on what they are but just like a little bit and then talking about

how Django can integrate with them because they are meaningfully different, both in terms of

inference costs. So serving them, you know, it's a whole new economic paradigm, right? It's

something I can't get hard numbers on this because they're all private, but it's at least 10 times

more computationally expensive to do, to talk to a chat bot than it is to do a Google search.

And right now they don't monetize, you know, they only monetize around 2%, you know, so I resisted

going into an economics kind of thing on it but it's wild i mean the amount of build out

both to train but even more so to serve these llms is is unprecedented for sure yeah it's the

expenditures and then the revenues and it just seems that the revenues are you know maybe they've

got a dream of how it will come but it just as a sort of you know looking at it from afar i'm like

in that you know transformers in 2017 then 2020 the scaling laws which to be fair are not physical

laws of the universe they're just more political economic laws similar to moore's law it wasn't

like a physics thing but it seemed like you just slammed these lm models with as much data as

possible as much compute as possible and um oh shoot brain dead what's the third thing um

data data data compute there's a third one everything comes okay well we can look you know

oh i guess parameters that's sort of the same thing so parameters like knobs you can turn

um and so that's that's like the b the billions of parameters it's probably trillions for some

for gpd5 and stuff but yeah i don't know it's all interesting i mean it's different i think for me i

learned a lot researching the talk and i think most web people aren't ai developers so it's good

for us to have a sense i mean one of the interesting things about parameters is that's

like you when you start you you pick a number of parameters that things you can turn they get you

know more and more generally is better but you can't just put a quadrillion because if you have

too many and you don't have enough data then it just repeats verbatim the training data so that's

why you need more data small models they used to call overfitting yeah well and i mean gpt2

now i'm getting on a rant but gpt2 was was trained on reddit on reddit stuff just like almost on a

laptop um was a reddit post with three three votes or more and so you focused on the inputs and then

the outputs took care of themselves now it's just vacuum up everything and so it's a mess right and

And so what they're doing is they're adding a filter on top of the model to make it available

for public consumption.

But to train that filter, they're using human-led reinforcement learning.

I'm getting that wrong.

But they're getting humans in the global South to review horrific stuff, to put a filter

on top because the inputs are kind of garbage.

So it's all the old colonialism stuff.

But anyways.

Anyway, it's not...

Okay.

So then...

Well, it's not going to end up.

But the cool part, I thought the demo was I wanted to, I'm quite keen on local models.

So Ollama, you can pull in whatever local model you want.

And I rigged up a demo, there's a GitHub repo where you can pull in whatever model you want

and then use server-sent events to have a chatbot that streams the tokens, which is

the key part I wanted.

And yeah, just to show Django as is can do a lot.

Like you don't need async views for it.

don't um you know i also played around with html streaming which is kind of cool but then you would

an interactive demo uh which i thought was a follow-up with from carson's talk yeah yeah yeah

up of your talk i'm interested to watch the the final thing i think the demo is super cool um but

the you had this the preliminary chat where you're kind of placing Django again in a wider context

and you had this nice slide about how the web is not the same as API endpoints and yeah I think

that's like that's really the drum we should be banging right is that yes okay you spin up an API

endpoint you connect it to your IM but the web application has so much more going on for it and

for inference with vllm which is like your and fast api but yeah you need everything and you can

kind of do it with fast api there's there's authentication but yeah like we're not on this

straight path but everything else you need payments authentication database orm django

sitting right there there's actually there's a euro python talk that i think just came out

where someone talked about combining all of them so yeah so i think it's a real opportunity for

django i think and i i'm trying to learn more about it and think about how we can meet them

where they are because one of the other big points was this new generation of young python ai

developers don't know the world and they and they think it's just an api endpoint and they either

feel trapped or just assume it's that's all there is to it but you know to carl to carson's talk

like withered tech like jango's here for 20 years like we've got a solution maybe not the best

solution we've got a solution to a lot of these problems so i want to do more around into you know

at the end of the day we're going to be calling these lms we're not going to be running them

ourselves but what does that look like you know sometimes it's streaming a lot of times it's not

it's just medical records right just send it over get a response it's feels like it could just be

carson carson was talking about young developers not even knowing what html forms were yeah yeah

i was trying to bang some of those drums um yeah and i think and he said and i agree that the onus

is on us with gray hair you know i got i got a little bit to uh you know to try to meet people

where to try to meet people where they're at you know it's not um because again i also going to

these python conferences people would i had another slide about like i was like well why

not Django for your web needs and they're like well Django's slow Django's old and it's hard to

learn and it's hard to know where to start well I'd start with um some great set of books yeah

yeah yeah yeah no no for sure yeah no and maybe some books that you know have examples of of this

in their next editions yeah so yeah so it's an opportunity I think you know it's great to go

these conferences but we also have to remember it's 300 people out of probably 3 million or

something that use django and you know just because we all know what htmx is and we all know

these things we need to speak outward a bit more so hopefully this you know the video version of

our podcast and maybe i'll do some videos to reach people where they are well we don't need to do

that but we want to just make it accessible how people um all right let's move on wait and do you

want to do the the mid-roll hacksoft who's sponsoring do you want to read out i would love

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be sponsors of podcasts, as they've been

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great guide on how to do Django,

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thing. They've been around for years.

Beyond the sponsorship, I think

Hacksoft is a great team.

All right, now we're going to let you talk.

So Google Summer of Code.

So Carson mentioned he was really excited

about template partials.

Yep.

And we're going to see.

So, you know, how can I say?

Like template partials.

So I sat down to start the new project back in the day,

like 4.2 was around,

so early part of 2023

when I stepped down from the fellow role.

And I'd read the essay on the HTMX website

about template fragments,

which I call partials for slightly different reasons.

But they go by this fragments or partials name.

And I was like, we need that.

And there was a couple of options in the ecosystem.

There's one called Django render block, I think.

I can't remember exactly what it's called,

but it had a render block to string function,

which you would call a block.

You'd get a named block from your template.

and you'd get it and you'd render that and you could return that.

But you had to adjust the view flow.

You had to, instead of returning a template response

with just the template name and the context

and then whatever magic Django does to actually render that

behind the scenes for you, you would render the template

and then pass it to an HTTP response and you return that.

And it's quite disruptive to your view logic.

Like the generic views, you're basically rewriting every one.

and that wasn't that wasn't what i wanted um and so i built template django template partials to

slightly different take on that which is how i wanted it and integrated that with the template

loader and i sort of announced it um django con europe in 2023 in edinburgh um and it was

like you know the response was phenomenal and so the cup you know whole lts cycle later we've got

farhan who's come in and done the google summer of code project to merge it into django core

and over the summer he was working hard and some nice tricky issue the template partials have been

working fine for two years no you know no issues at all we had i first released it we had a bit of

feedback change the ipi etc been working perfectly for everybody but that step up into getting into

django it's like oh there's quite a lot of resistance there and enough resistance such

that I'd kind of cracked open a branch

and started off at it a couple of times,

but then gone, oh, I'm too busy.

I haven't got time to do this.

And I think without the Google Summer of Code Project,

it probably would have just sat there indefinitely.

But with the Google Summer of Code Project,

Farhan has brought it up to scratch,

merged it in,

and it will be part of Django 6.0,

which is feature-free tomorrow.

Tomorrow as we record this,

today as we release it.

And it will be, the alpha will be there,

have to just retreat to a cave they can you know do what you've done right you said right after

five years you had all these ideas because i remember you just like sort of launched it and

i said wow like that's that's quite a thing and you were like well i just did it in an afternoon

but you've been stewing on it for years forever forever like the neapolitan which is the other

like as a sort of thing that i would need and so when it came to when it came to oh do you know

what i'm going to have to end up right actually now back in back in business writing fresh

generic views for lots of models no i'm not doing this the old way i'm doing it i'm

putting neapolitan in place and i'm doing um and it's just it's quick cred views is the tagline for

anyone unfamiliar what does neapolitan allows you to it allows you to define your model define your

your crowd view to specify some fields and then all of a sudden you've got the create view the

list view the retrieve view the update view etc when you've talked about it's it's really almost

to build it up and customize as you go so it's just just a different approach but we're you know

we kind of do the same you know like david hennemeyer hansen gave a gave a keynote a couple

weeks ago talking about um crud monkeys and i'm not sure if i love using the word monkeys but

i take his point about we're just kind of doing crud and there's nothing wrong with that and then

there's just tweaks to it and so this this yeah speeds things up it gets inclined yeah

earning six figure salaries, just writing CRUD apps. And it's like, nobody makes a six figure

salary just writing a CRUD app. You get the six figure salary for the bits after you've got the

CRUD app in place. And what I love about Neapolitan is I can bootstrap it in seconds

and I've got the basic CRUD structure in place. And then as I'm experimenting, as I'm evolving

the application, as I'm getting into the details of what makes it a valuable piece of software

rather than something that could be automatically generated, then I can customize and it's got

all the right hooks.

Yeah, it's got the scaffolding.

You get the salary for what comes after the aircraft.

boilerplate code for django anyways because it's so well documented and so mature but

yeah it's what next is what matters um csp well let's talk about so django 6.0 there's three

be um csp content security policy is being merged into core so there's for years it's been this

third-party package uh django csp which has enabled you to set this and csp is like um

it's a defense in depth measure so if you temp if you use um you know the temperate language

correctly and you do all your auto escaping you don't turn that off more or less safe for most

cross-site scripting attacks like it's very hard to smuggle one in but as a defense in depth

measure you csp labors you to say things like only load javascript from the same domain as the

application comes or only from the same domain as the application and this one other specific domain

that i've told you about so if by some accident you you've um unescaped java unescaped script tag

does make it to the page the browser will see the unescaped script tag it will say no this domain

this you know evil.com isn't allowed isn't included in the content security policy as a source for um

scripts so i'm not going to load it so it's kind of a defense in depth measure um it's massively

complicated it's like there's just so much to it and it's nothing you'd want to do on your own

right it's the batteries like you know yeah exactly that it's nothing you want to do on your

own you do not want to be implementing csp protection by yourself and django csp the third

party package has been maintained well for years but there was a period when it wasn't and yeah

so what's what's happening there and for it to be in core i think it's you know you talk about

battery i think it's one of the hard batteries that it's good that django provides and so i think

it's a major feature and i'm quite excited to be using it i i was i was joking on um mast on the

other day about whether it's too early to deploy 6.0 before the feet before even the feature freeze

deploy it to my production environment and it's because i want to move to the um in core csp

protection rather than the third-party package and i don't really want to have to wait till

december to do that so i'm now thinking okay so can i can i release this early well and you're

particular commit on the you know the branch and know that that's as good as a as a release commit

and i can be happy with it so that's not a problem for me so that's the main one i would say then

then the next big feature is i think that the we're going to um merge the um the back end the

interface for django tasks into um django itself so django tasks is this um was this proposal from

jake to merge um or to create um a background task queue for django so you know if you want to send

the classic example is you want to send an email and you so sending an email might take a few

seconds by the time you connect to the server and do all those things so you don't want to do it in

a request you want to take the request put the task to the side and say i'm going to send that

later return the response quickly to the user and then have a worker in the background that can send

off the email or generate the pdf or whatever the background task is that's been in development um

for a cycle now um and the interface bit of it will be merged into django in 6.0 you'll still

to actually use it as a background task worker you'll still need to use a third-party package

where the database back end so the default option will be to store tasks just in your database so

you write um do this task to to your database and then the worker fetches it from the database and

does it that's still a going to be a third-party package you're going to need to install that as

an extra and that's just to give it time to mature and to make sure that it meets it it's tested

widely enough to meet django's stability guarantees um yeah the last thing we need to do is merge it

very quickly and then find that it's flawed in some way that causes problems to existing

so although yeah those are the you got his surname momentarily i look i looked i looked it up sorry

jake while you were talking um yeah so very exciting actually and we should we should mention

also i got a chance to meet jacob walls our new fellow who was at who was there um so you played

was the main reason i think why my july was ludicrously busy was that we had over 100 applicants

um which is amazing and it you know of those 100 applicants we had many which were very high

quality and it just goes to show the strength of django and where we're at and you know sometimes

we bring our hands are we okay are we doing no it's it was it was amazing to see the the number

of really high quality applications for the fellow role um and we had to narrow it down

and we had to do interviews i mean you know it was quite a big process but jacob's gonna be amazing

uh second of the three also sarah boyce was there as well and she was during the sprints

she was sort of letting him take the lead and scurry around as i've seen you do for years and

years and years but no he's i mean he's a very very very smart person um so i think it's i think

it's great that we got him so one more big thing i'm going to mention django on the med so there

was talks on this paulo melchiori mentioned this is i know you're excited about this i'm excited

about this what's what's the quick pitch and what do you want to say about it okay so django on the

which is on the mediterranean coast in northeastern spain it's three days to get together and work on

django i mean my wife said the tagline needs to be not as exciting as perhaps it sounds um because

it's because it's geeks in english too right in case that same dry humor um what is it it's yeah

three days to get together and work on work on django basically we're going to um start eight

eight o'clock to about two ish um nice breakfast when you turn out coffee some croissants these

kind of things make sure that you're fired up for the day um three days and then in the afternoon

do a bit of exploring bit of socializing a bit more talking about the ideas you know and evening

meals and all the things like a conference but without the conference bit you know um there's a

nice uh post on the python blog from uh look at who's the um python developer in residence um

saying that uh you know the sprints are the best bit and i'm like yeah no they really are and

that's why you should come to django on the med because it's just um so we're the first day we

want to do a roadmap session um so we're gonna have people we're gonna hopefully we're gonna

have a fellow we're gonna have a couple of board members we're gonna have a couple of steering

council members we've got we've got really the absolute a team of you know some of my all-time

stars are turning up um it's going to be amazing and we hope to drive forward the the roadmap um

sketch out some of the ideas and it's not just like the it's not just like you know if i say to

you one of the top community priorities is modernize contrib.auth right okay well that just

sounds like an absolutely impossible project that we need to get andrew godwin and we need to lock

him in a cave for six months and he'll merge with the kickstarter yeah yeah that's not how it can be

done um we need to have modernized contrib.auth and we need to break it down and spend some time

working on well what does that mean what are the what are the sort of pillars of coming up with a

serious plan for um modernizing country ball to or say as an example or you know um adding typing

to django do we want to add type hints to django okay if we do what does that mean what are the

approachable routes into that what would an experiment look like what would all of these

questions which until they until they're cashed out a little bit we we can't really make progress

which is why you know modernized country of all it's sort of sat there on the on the back burner

for a while but it's not really made progress and if we can then the third step the first step is

identify the core roadmap questions the second step is to break them down into you know something

a bit more addressable and then the third step is if you've got those identified tasks then you can

put out the call for volunteers and so be years and years we've had this problem where volunteers

would turn up they'd be like i want to help and it'd be like well we haven't got anything to point

but if we've if we've had a bit of time to flesh out some of the the core roadmap ideas the things

that the community would like to work on then we can say look do you know what they're here

are half a dozen identified things which are addressable to a new contributor and it's not

that we don't have volunteers it's that we don't have enough guidance for volunteers yeah yeah so

that and then we're going to have a birthday party i've got i'm hoping to organize a special birthday

party treat for Django and then more time to just work i've got i'm gonna get you know um person a

and person b in a room i'm gonna lock them up together with loads of coffee and i'm gonna say

year right so in yes you are in pescara in italy where palo is based yeah exactly so the first one

twice a year would be good um we've got to think about how it clashes with um agenda for say

jangok on europe and things like that so we need to you need to consider but yes that's the idea

is to do it you know one in palo verde one in pescada and you know maybe we can go somewhere

else if you know cyprus i know some member of the jang community lives in malta we could have

tebow um colas is dsf present he organized one and it was a couple of years ago and it's on the

forum you can search for it perhaps we can put the link but the number two um impactful item that was

that came out was to do active developer sprints for you know dangle's active developers active

contributors and with that's what we're doing we're putting together the active developer

sprints and i want to say to people if you're a new contributor if you're like if you'd like to

get involved you're you're welcome to you don't have to be an established contributor i'm excited

because some of my superheroes are coming to jangle the met but i'm also i want you know you

to come if you're if you're like you know what i i want to get involved too because the other goal

is to get the new contributors to come

and help them get onboarded

and joined with the experienced contributors.

And so by the time we've left,

those people are up and running as well.

And that's in October, 7th to the 9th.

Okay, we'll put the link in the show notes.

he put, it's on the forum,

but he also wrote a really nice blog post

in January 2024 about everything.

And yes, Active Developer Sprints was number two.

and and yeah yeah yeah the biggest thing is like okay let's if we can do it once then we can do it

you know time and time again and the exact details don't matter so much as is it possible is it

feasible and yes it is and we're doing it it's kind of yeah and it's not a new idea right i think

problem of you know the sprints at the end is helpful but it's not quite enough time not

everyone's there you know three days but also three days coming in with ideas as opposed to

like at the end of a conference you know i i've seen it takes you know the thursday is helping

people get set up and people do stuff and then friday sometimes there's a great burst but usually

people are it's a little more so what's that yeah like in my case like i left you know a lot of

hood in brookline mass which is pretty nice but in a different way yeah lovely i mean i i like

yeah well no yes i'm excited about django on the met um all right so we we have to quickly

i'm not gonna move on we skipped over zagsy's keynote on on the two yeah yeah so i'll tell you

that together and he sort of previewed it for me and i was um you know mentioning his one of his

ideas was bring jango's framework into core and i think i have a little scar tissue from being on

the board around that so i was a little bit like yeah we should do something about apis i don't

know if that's going to work but he got a really great response and there was a huge long forum

post um and he had a bunch of ideas so i'll toss it over to you carlton so um the general idea i

think was we should django should have an api story and he was advocating for that being primarily drf

and i know that second part is not quite what you would say you know i absolutely agree with him

absolutely and his option three was document the the options we've got which is drf and probably

django ninja are the two oh for sure ninja for sure yes we need a an api story absolutely and

yes we should document the options and yes it shouldn't be the case that you discover django

and you can't find on the website easily you know what you should do if you just want to you know

arrest endpoint how do i do that that shouldn't be a mystery you shouldn't have absolutely we

should document all that but had we merged drf into django core a decade ago or even five years

ago it might it might have been a good idea but now things have moved on like drf is dated it's

the last generation and i i i understand people are using it but it's like

if we just merged that into core and said this is the django solution i think that would be

us saying we give up on innovation we we we we quit i i i think there are demonstrate i mean

django ninja shows that much more is possible and yet i don't think django ninja is the final

solution i think there's a number of reasons why it's not perfect but it it it was fresh

and it it demonstrates just absolutely clearly um the the other frameworks out there the fast apis

the light stars

using Pydantic

using typing

which FastFGI

does both

I mean whether

it's Pydantic

I use caters

so if I want to

serialize

so what's the

main problem

with DRF

the main problem

with DRF

is that serializers

are last generation

they're slow

because basically

they loop through

the fields

that they're given

and they loop

through the object

and they do

the getter

whereas if you

take caters

what it does

is the first time

it comes through

to your serializer

it kind of

generates code

which is

as good as if you wrote it by hand it's as optimized so it's kind of native speed and it's

just much much much much faster than um the rest framework serializers that we we know and love and

the django forms the same sort of ideas but forms aren't generally used in performance critical

ways whereas people with apis they really often are needing fast serialization because they're

doing thousands of records you know over the wire as fast as the api can respond so it kind of

matters um and so whether it's pydantic whether it's caters whether it's message spec there's

there's the whole my point is that there is a whole collection of next generation solutions

out there which django if we you know one of the goals of the dsf is to push the state of the art

forward well we don't do that by merging a last generation solution into django yeah well and i

for an idea is brought up there's a discussion on the forum and it can feel like people are

blocking stuff because they have a different of opinion on how to do it but they're not saying

we shouldn't do it right and so this is hopefully getting people in a room right so because nobody

wants to be a blocker on this stuff but it's you know the implementation details matter right and

absolutely like people there are developers out there who literally hate django because of drf

right now i know that assumes they know about drf that's another whole separate

yeah because of the way the serializers are and all of it and look so serializers yes drf

maybe modern serializers yes drf is wonderful and i spent a lot of time working on it we should say

away from it now but i built an entire career around drf before i was the general fellow and

i built um web applications for you know some of the biggest companies in the world using drf and

it was a wonderful thing and i learned so much from it but it is out of that and there is no

something discussing you know the different approaches i mean my takeaway like i was talking

to a number of people there's a working group on the website you know i think if i had a magic wand

the two things i would do is well executive director which people agree with this um the

board actually discussed they've done so this is one of the board has done a lot of work around

this and something fell through that they spent a lot of time on and that's something worth

mentioning because when you're on a board you know they spent hours and hours and hours and hours

and then it's just for reasons they can discuss like not nothing bad it didn't it didn't happen

and that can feel discouraging but it's all important because it gets us close like we need

one we'll find the right person we'll find the timing you know but that is the kind of stuff that

i hope the board and i think and they're doing a much better job than when i was on it talk about

the work that they do because it's thankless work it's important work um so executive director and

that was raised numerous times um the second is i would and i think i'm even gonna do this i this i

think i told you the idea so the home page right like we can't change everything i was like what

about a third-party package home page right like i could when i have a moment and i'm truly

procrastinating i'll i'll vibe code um i would like four things on the home page well what would

I want to look modern we all agree it doesn't look modern you know if you look at media js

you look at view js those look they have colors you know more modern color color well yeah they

also they also have sponsors boom on the page because you know that's part of the executive

director getting the money um but then the four things we need is we need and maybe even just

ugly boxes somewhere we need api and just links to like an api story crm which django cms wagtail

like we have fantastic story there's other ones those are the two big ones um i would like to see

a hello world tutorial on there you know not just polls and then ai and maybe it just links to a

page where it talks about how you can use django where it's appropriate but just an ai story i

think you can't be a web framework in 2025 without an ai story and i think it's important to say

do async there was a um a post recently about um why isn't async io more popular than it is and

like the sort of headline bit was oh django's async is underdeveloped it's like it's really

not the only bit left is the is the cursors to the to the actual orm right the the rest of it

all works so if you want to do wiring up to an llm async views they're wonderful and gonna work

perfectly for you but that's not the narrative that's out there in the ecosystem people are like

oh no, Django is async.

Only very specific use cases.

It is sort of interesting

that I think that was always the issue

with WebSockets with 2A

and async was a great technology,

but how common was the use case?

And LLMs are a use case

where some of these things,

that's part of the thing.

Async matters when you are fast API

and you're in front of an inference engine.

to make a call to a remote server and i'm going to have to wait for that server or it might it

either stream back to me or i'll have to wait a long time to for it to return its response and

then return i want async because i want to be able to wait for that whilst i'm handling other

with the ecosystem page the steering the new steering oh yeah and we should mention there's

no one can find it um you know that's a separate thing people i mean people are working on this

right search and you know have search have the search bar on the home page which right now we

don't it's in the docs which you have to click to so i mean i remember when i was a fellow and we

there we just weren't able to get very much achieved we got some things achieved but we

weren't able to get very much achieved and i think the website really does need a you know well and

the correct url to go to the website anyway let's let's move on all right let's wrap it up so we

projects that we're excited about um so nano django richard terry gave i believe i i missed it so i

don't know if it's a talk or a lightning talk um but this there's a lot of enthusiasm around this

around just a lightweight django and you know making it not so scary for newcomers i need to

go see his his talk i missed it do you have anything to he's got a new site and he's got a

these things that brings python into the browser to run run your django application in the browser

it's all very cool um and he's doing a great job and i think you know um if you've got a big

application and you there's an endpoint which you can't you just can't take down while you

while you you know while you update the rest of it you can spin that endpoint out into a little

nano nano django side point and that end point can keep serving while you update the rest of

the site you know it's not it's not just for the hello world getting getting started examples but

he's doing a really good job pushing that forward and adding the sort of dotting the i's and crossing

the t's on these these micro django examples that we've been playing with for years and years

yes do you want to mention the other two yeah okay so my my really exciting one adam hill

um uh dj light which is um a really simple django application to you just add it to your installed

apps and it tweaks your setting there might be one or two activities but it tweaks your settings

to give you the right um setting for sq light in production um yeah yeah there are talks on this

and there's blog posts um him and anzi um whose surname again i can't can't remember they've been

working on this for a while and there is now and as they have in the rails community a really um

it's really plausible that you can serve at least your your single user blog application

and small hobby applications using sqlite in production rescue line production um i would i

put my would i put my you know my business oh no i'm still going to use postgres i think but

read heavy it's great yeah read heavy um and sqlite still doesn't allow concurrent rights

but you can you can teach it to not error and just wait for the other right to finish and then do

your right and that's good enough for almost all you and it's also it's i mean i'm pretty sure i

car every fridge every you know every everything you you know these vapes the youngsters have this

oh god yeah but anyway the reason why i like dj light is it wraps you'd be up until this you had

to go and search and you had to read the blog posts and you had to extract exactly what was

the right configuration was now you can just pip install dj light follow the follow the two-step

we've already come on already and do you want to mention um jacob's uh reef's django form set

javascript all built in and all the rest that give you all the whole gallery of um form widgets that

are more advanced more elaborate and you can you know and it's it's all modern and you can include

just the the javascript for the for the widgets you need to use and keep your page weights light

and all the rest you don't have to build in the whole library which is very big the intro um post

the intro bit of the docs where it talks through the quick start it's it's it's a bit dry and it

doesn't really motivate motivate it but it's a wonderful library and what i recommend is

don't skip that bit come back to that when you've go just go and install it and download a demo and

build like one or two of these widgets in in action see how it is so give it half an hour

that rather than reading the docs per se and then come back to the explanation in the docs once

you've convinced yourself actually this is quite cool because it's a wonderful project and he's

been putting effort into that for years and it's immensely high quality and it's i think probably

for me the most underrated project in the django ecosystem wow that's high praise yeah no it's

got i got to spend some time with him which was great yeah all right so last thing um we're going

to try book recommendation so i've been battering i've been so my personal side i've been doing

trying to do some book reviews um and i would i've been talking your ear off about empire of

ai so i've been reading all the i'm waiting for your review i'm quite yeah yeah i know

the cliff notes no it's really really good she's um karen how ho sorry say her name wrong um

has been giving great video interviews and it really just ties together a lot of the

um yeah the technical the cultural everything else about ai in a way that i haven't seen even

though i've read a lot of these books so i highly recommend it okay and you have you have one that's

rust which is um from manning uh it's a great one the first chapter is why refactor to rust and

clearly so you can sit with the cool kids at the lunch table right what else but yeah um it has a

an overview of rust which is a sort of second chapter and there's no way on earth you could

learn rust from that chapter like it sort of implies you could but you couldn't but if you

already have been dabbled with rust a little bit it's quite a good chapter to lock in some of the

concepts that you might have come across in other books but it's not a learn rust in from that

chapter i promise you but it's got chapters on integrating with c integrating with blah blah blah

um but the python chapters are really solid they show you how to um embed python in rust and rust

in python and they show you about benchmarking which is just key right it's like am i i'm making

all these changes i'm using this tech am i making anything better actually talks about that and

shows how you might you know you might demonstrate whether you're making things better or not which

is sorely missing in my experience so anyway i'm i read some of that over the summer and i was like

yes, that's a quality refactoring tool.

Well, I think that's it.

We're going to do our outro.

Again, thank you to Hacksoft for sponsoring.

Your development partner, BeyondCode.

More about their links in the description.

And give us feedback, everyone.

Leave a comment on YouTube.

Let us know separately.

But we're going to try doing videos all fall.

We're going to have some guests,

but also go topic-driven.

And the next week,

we'll talk about the Django survey

and the future of Django.

Okay.

I'll see everyone next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.